I don’t know why you say goodbye, we say “hallo”

BUDAPEST – “When women and minorities are hired over white men, we call it ‘positive discrimination.’"

It is too early in the morning, and I’m sitting in the board room of Exxon’s Budapest office, blearily facing four chipper Hungarian employees who gather twice a week to learn English before work. I rub my eyes and tell them the English phrase is affirmative action. They look confused, but insist the same term in Hungarian is positive discrimination. I am having a hard time believing it. The term sounds too politically incorrect.

Maybe it’s a mistranslation? I ask.

Oh no, I am assured. In Hungarian, the words are positiv discriminazi (pronounced poh-see-teev dee-scree-mee-nat-see).

“Yes, you know,” explains a bespectacled young man, a brainy blond computer tech. “If a woman or a minority is hired for a position, its still discrimination, but it’s positive for them.”

I cannot begin to explain to them how funny this sounds to an American ear. I find myself often charmed, occasionally appalled and always entertained by my students frequently since I moved to Budapest in mid-September, particularly when it comes to doing the one job I swore I would never, ever do – teaching English.

**
“See you later, hallo!”

In Hungary, it’s not hard for a foreigner like me to feel like a stranger in a strange land. Everything is done in the opposite order – from the postal addresses, which list city and zip code first, then the street name, and finally the street number – to names, which are listed last name, then first name. Even the computer keyboard is just a little funky – the”y” and the “z” key are in opposite places, to accommodate all the extra vowel sounds that make Hungarian so challenging to pronounce.

Because the standard greeting – szia – is also the standard sign off, the alternative greeting hallo is just as likely to be said if you are coming or going.

Of course, I’ve lived overseas before, for four years in Asia, so I’m used to not fitting in and needing to adapt. But there is something a little surreal about being in Budapest, where my Pan-Hungarian-Romanian roots help me blend in until I try to talk. There is a confusing … well, fusion … of familiar and unfamiliar elements makes me feel oddly off-kilter, rather than extremely odd.

Quite frankly, it suits my current mood, because these days, I feel little backwards myself.

Ten years ago I was working for Time Magazine and then as a journalist trainer, where I was flown to exotic locations like Ulaanbaatar, Tbilisi and Yerevan to teach newswriting and editing. At that time, I had multiple job offers and many opportunities, but strangely, I began turning them down. When friends were shocked because I refused to even interview with the Asian Wall Street Journal for a travel-writing job, I didn’t even question it. I was looking for something different: what, exactly, I didn’t know, but I was seeking something else.

Four years ago, I found that something else when I began doing visual art. Suddenly, the energy I poured into my paid work was going into my art work, as I began struggling to learn to draw, paint, and otherwise render what I see, think, feel and believe. Sounds admirable, yes? But in truth, it is equal parts freeing and frightening to become an artist. As if sensing my lack of commitment, my former profession ceased to serve me as it had of old. Jobs that I could once get at the snap of a finger eluded me – and most of the ones I could obtain were full-time and too draining. I needed money. So I thought I’d try different types of work, something a little less taxing, a little less mentally stimulating, to balance out the intense hours I was spending painting.

I tried everything: bartending proved to be the most successful mainstay for me, but I also worked – often simultaneously – as a self-help book ghost writer, an acupuncturist front desk clerk, a catering assistant, a newsletter writer for a communications company, an assistant to the director of an after-school teen drop-in program at the YMCA, and a world history textbook writer, among many others. As my painting improved, I got poorer – I was making frequent runs to the food bank and struggling to keep up with my bills. And worse off, I felt torn: I wanted to use my brain and my hard-won experience as a journalism teacher and trainer, but I didn’t know how to do it without it bleeding too heavily into my studio time, my right-brained artistic life.

I remember running into a former journalism colleague from the online ABC news website while working as a bartender at the Seattle Art Museum. I could see the confusion in her eyes as she introduced me to her husband, and she never looked at me again that night. I understood how she felt. I had the same feeling about myself and my life. What had I done? Who was I now? Where am I going?

I began to feel like two people: inexperienced and fragile as an artist, on the same day I could confidently and with authority stride up to a podium and speak to 100 people about the status of journalism development work in the former Soviet Union.

This uneasy state of dichotomy is how I now live, so I moved to Budapest, where at least I have an excuse other than my own decisions for feeling backwards.

I don’t know if “hallo” means “hallo” or “goodbye,” or even what I’m saying “hallo” to.

**

“I wish you a hatful of it.”

Most of what I know about Budapest I learn through conversation with my students, and to a lesser degree from my ever-patient Hungarian teacher (lesser only because of my meager understanding of Hungarian). Take my favorites, the group that calls itself the Irish Pub – made up of two sisters, Ely and Agi, and Agi’s boyfriend, Akos – who want to learn enough English to be able to work and live in Dublin or some other more prosperous country in the European Union, to which Hungary is now bound.

We were comparing English and Hungarian sayings one day when they asked me:

”What do you tell someone when they are about to perform on stage?”

Break a leg, I replied.

Ah, it’s similar in Hungarian, said Agi. “Except we say break both your arms and legs.”

She looked only a little bit puzzled when I burst out laughing.

The Hungarians are not a light and easy group. They’ve been ruled and subjugated by many different leaders from Genghis Kahn on down the line, and watched their country dwindle to a fraction of its former glory since the middle ages and the Hapsburg rule They suffered staggering losses in WWII on the losing German side, including a near evaporation -- and unspoken complicity about it -- of their Jewish and gypsy populations. They still commemorate the 1956 revolution, in which many Hungarian protesters were ruthlessly killed by Soviet troops to suppress the rebellion against communist rule. These days, most hate communism, though some older folks miss the socialist aspect of it – free health care, guaranteed jobs, not too much thinking required.

In the 17 years of Hungarian independence, the country is now running to catch up with the rest of the world. People are up early here and work long hours. Evidence that Hungary has marketed itself through its skilled, relatively cheap labor force abounds: for example, IBM’s global human resources division is here, as well as a Microsoft campus. This human capital is the only thing, beyond paprika, that has put Hungary on the map. Most Hungarians are well aware that they are in the game only because they cost less than a worker in another, “more developed” country. And they aren’t, as one could imagine, exactly jumping up and down for joy about it.

Which must be why, in Hungarian, it’s considered lucky if you step in shit.

Budapest is in many ways a beautiful city, with its towering, somewhat crumbling baroque-style architecture. But what they don’t tell you in the guidebooks is that Budapest streets are full of dog shit. People here love their dogs, and the beloved creatures can be seen everywhere, picking their way through the streets in tiny dog sweaters and on little or long leashes, depending upon the breed. But people do not, as a rule, pick up the shit their dogs leave behind. Walking to the grocery store can become an obstacle course, a dance around steaming piles, streaming urine and the occasional splat of vomit (usually human, sometimes canine).

The Irish Pub group tells me it’s not only lucky to wish someone to step in shit. If you are really being magnanimous, you wish them a “hatful of it.”

“You don’t say this?” they ask me, shaking their heads in wonder.

I shake my head, too, but for an entirely different reason.

**
I have always, in my mind, looked down upon English teaching as something travelers did when they didn’t have other job skills. Hah. That was before I realized, once I excluded myself from my first set of job skills -- writing and editing really, really fast -- that I had little to offer the Central Europeans besides my status as a native speaker.

I immediately took on a gig as a teacher at an internationally renowned English language school in Budapest. What I discovered was two things: English teachers in Central Europe are akin to Mexican workers laboring in kitchens and on construction sites quasi-legally in the U.S. The work is low-paying and to get my money, I must ask a Hungarian language pornographic website to “invoice” the school for me as an independent contractor, so everyone can avoid paying taxes.

The other surprise was that I enjoy the actual teaching.

Where else could I get to talk to my students about gay marriage, bash George Bush and discuss salaries and how badly in debt U.S. citizens are on their credit cards (myself included, dear reader, I’m not pointing fingers)? Where else could I begin to learn about this new culture in which I was living? And I got it ... these students needed me, and other native speakers like me, to learn English. They needed it. Who else were they going to learn it from? I felt strangely called to help my students.

When Akos began interviewing for software developing jobs in the UK and Holland, we worked for hours on his interview skills. It wasn’t just to the English, but how to answer questions in a way the potential employers would expect (as of this writing, he’s on the verge of being offered at least one job in Holland – cross your fingers for him). My student Katalina, who runs the Swiss Airline office in Budapest, practices English-language powerpoint presentations she must make to company employees from all over Europe. I am generally interested in these little dramas – and am happy to leave once they are over, ready to shut myself into my studio for a few hours.

These days, I am doing a little bit of everything to survive: teaching English ten hours a week, teaching art for a few hours at the new studio-art school space where I now paint, and doing the occasional journalism training gig somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Its odd hours and an odd life, but somehow, the English teaching I enjoy more than I should. Or more than I thought I should.

In any event, here I am now.

Hallo.